1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the systems and methods described herein relate to removing duplicate consumer leads.
2. Description of the Related Art
Consumer lead generation is a large and growing industry. The lead generation industry identifies individual or business consumers that may be interested in buying products or services and sells contact information for those consumers to providers of the products or services. For example, a residential loan lead generation company, such as LowerMyBills.com, identifies consumers interested in getting a residential loan and sells the consumers' contact information to lenders of residential loans. The contact information of the potentially interested buyer is known as a “lead.”
Lead generation companies sell leads for many products and services, including residential loans, commercial loans, real estate agents, automobiles, attorneys, housecleaners, and many other products and services. Providers of such products and services buy leads because leads effectively identify consumers that are already interested in the providers' products and services. Accordingly, leads often result in more sales than advertising, cold calling, or other forms of salesmanship.
Because of the effectiveness of leads, some product and service providers periodically buy leads, or generate their own leads, from multiple sources. Unfortunately, such product and service providers may get duplicate leads, thus depriving the providers of the full value of each lead. Duplicate leads also hurt lead generation companies because the companies must generally either refund the purchase price of duplicate leads or discount the price of all leads to account for duplicate leads.